In Her Own Sweet Time

It is one of the longer gestations in literary history: Thirty years from conception to birth of Nancy Milford’s new bestseller “Savage Beauty,” a biography of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The author is on tour to promote her book and answer questions. Or not. What has she been doing for 30 years? What happened between her first sensational book, “Zelda,” published in 1972 when she was 31, and this new one, which took three decades to write? The author is now 63.

“Pish posh. Who cares?” she asks. “It’s my life, and I can do with it what I want.”

For how many of these intervening years was she actually writing the book?

“Oh, who knows. Maybe 22 years. I’d do little bits here, little bits there. Then I’d drop off. I obviously wasn’t writing every day, or I’d have finished 20 years ago.”

Milford is serving tea in the buttercup-yellow room of a Beverly Hills hotel at the start of her tour. She has no patience for those who will try to deconstruct her life and her work, she says.

Yes, but her life and work are the subjects of this interview.

She stares in defiance--and then she laughs. Milford is not the careworn, disappointed scholar one might have imagined after reading about her 30-year labor digging through musty, yellowed scraps of Millay’s life. Nor is she anything like the frump in her unflattering dust jacket photo, which you shouldn’t mention if you happen to meet her because the picture was taken by her daughter, Kate.

She is, in person, a beaming Valkyrie sort: 5-foot-8, well-cushioned, with snowy hair, azure eyes and a voice so throaty and intense that when she quotes Millay’s poetry--which she does often, and with head-tossed-back abandon--she brings to mind her own sizzling descriptions of the poet’s readings for adoring fans 80 years ago.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Milford arrived in New York from Michigan at 23 to get her doctoral degree. Her dissertation, on F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, was published as “Zelda,” sold close to 2 million copies, was translated into 14 languages and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Critics hailed it as a magnificent read, a scholarly breakthrough and a feminist leap ahead--the biography by which all future work on the Fitzgeralds would be judged.

She was instantly propelled into the celebrity-author stratosphere but didn’t stop to bask. Milford announced her next project almost immediately. It would be the biography of Millay, who had died 20 years earlier. Her huge cache of personal papers had never been read by anyone--not even the poet’s sister Norma, who’d kept them pristine since 1950 when Millay died at age 58.

Until her own death in 1986, Norma lived in her sister’s house, slept in her bed, and kept all suitors for the papers at bay.

Milford’s announcement that she had won exclusive access to this treasure caused shivers of anticipation in the literary world. Could she do it again? Would she create art out of the leavings of the poet’s life, revive interest in Millay’s work, which had fallen out of favor?

From then on, silence. Until this month, when “Savage Beauty” was finally published. Unfortunately, Milford had dawdled a bit too long. After Norma died, the poet’s papers went to the Library of Congress, where anyone could read them. And somebody did. Daniel Mark Epstein, a poet himself, wrote his own biography of Millay, “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” (Henry Holt, 2001).

What happened when Milford learned, after all those years of research and writing, that hers would not be the first and only biography of Millay? When she realized that her exclusivity was shattered, that her book might be reviewed on the same page, perhaps on the same day--and sometimes in the very same article--with a book by an “upstart” author who had studied the same sources she’d pored over for years?

“I’d rather not discuss that.” Pause. “Well, since he is riding on my shirttails, I might as well say something. Let me simply say I think the more that’s written about Edna St. Vincent Millay the better. Of course, the timing in this case was somewhat awkward.”

Yes, but wasn’t it extremely distressing as well?

“No. Don’t get me wrong. I’m human, I really care. But I did take a long time to write my book.” Norma had died, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society was set up to keep the poet’s works alive, Milford says. “It is run by people who, while they knew Norma Millay, they did not know Edna. And they were not themselves necessarily scholars or artists or writers. They fulfilled their responsibility as best they could.”

By giving the papers to the Library of Congress before her book came out?

“Well, I think, my dear, they sold those papers for a considerable amount. In other words, there was a profit motive that was involved in this. These people wanted a certain amount of money per month from me for exclusivity. I couldn’t afford to do it. And you know ... if that is how they felt, it was their right. They could do and choose and be whatever they wish. So they did.”

Milford has, either by nature or by osmosis, some of the same feisty, nonconformist characteristics she ascribes to the frail, pale, flame-haired poet whose life has consumed so much of her own.

She hasn’t just been writing and researching, she says. “I have really lived my life.” She puts the accent on lived. Within those 30 years, she raised three children, married and divorced, taught on and off at universities, has been on just about every major book award nominating and judging committee that exists. She is a founder of the Writer’s Room in Manhattan, a place where authors can write undisturbed for a small monthly fee.

And she has evidently done research that was more extensive than could be expected of even the most meticulous scholar--although that’s not exactly how Milford puts it.

“At one point, I had written 400 or 500 pages about Millay’s childhood, before she even turned 21. There was this sense among some people that, uh, I might be demented.”

Of course, she was not. She had simply become enchanted with what she’d learned about the family of three little Millay sisters, whose divorced mother was always off working as a live-in practical nurse, and who trusted her daughters to raise themselves in a tiny house in the poorest part of a mill town on the rugged coast of Maine.

They had no furniture, no heat, no electricity. They had a kitchen floor so damp that it actually froze in winter and they could skate on it. The hammock in the front room was the only place to sit. But their absentee mother had given them something more precious than any material possessions.

“She filled the house with the scores of great operas, with books of great poetry--whether it was Lowell or Emerson or Thoreau. It was, in the deepest sense, a classy life. She read to them when she was there. They knew they were loved even when she wasn’t there. Sometimes they hadn’t enough to eat, but they were always inspired. By the books, by the beauty of where they lived. By the love. It’s an American story right down to its bootstraps. They were the best America had to offer in a very special sense.”

Milford’s passion for her subject is evident as she speaks. Of course, an editor or publisher might consider her zeal excessive. She won’t discuss the circumstances, but after a decade or more into the project she was moved from Harper & Row, who were Edna Millay’s publishers, to Random House and given a whole new set of editors. It’s true that she took a long time to get the book done, she says, but “writing the book gave as much to me as I gave to it. It has utterly changed my life. And it was such fun!”

She has, for example, “mysteriously found herself living in the heart of Greenwich Village,” where 80 years ago Edna Millay enjoyed some of her earliest romantic and literary flings. “I mean, why do I live on Washington Square? I mean, it’s loony. I moved there the year Norma died.”

And then there’s Matinicus, a remote island 23 miles off the coast of Maine. “It’s a place Millay mentioned only in one sonnet,” the author says. But Milford couldn’t shake it from her mind. Then she saw a tiny rental ad about 20 years ago. “I answered it. I’ve been going there with my children, and now my grandchild, ever since. “

She feels a poem fragment coming on, tosses her head back, lifts her chin and recites:

Hearing your words, and not a word among them Tuned to my liking

I thought how on a salty day the wind comes rushing through the Gut and the island women stand and peering north with dahlia tubers dripping from their hands, their words cut me like the ice upon the shore.

Matinicus. I want to be there once more.

Silence. Then Milford speaks in a different, softer tone.

“You know, one’s life really is changed by writing a book like this. I mean, I found Matinicus. I would never have gone there. Never.”

Why did she choose Millay--who’d long ago lost her luster with the public as a poet--and whose easy-to-comprehend rhymed verse was shunned by academics once the more obscure free verse of the modernists surfaced.

“I wanted to write a book about someone who was no one else’s creature. One could have said about Zelda that she was Fitzgerald’s invention. Millay invented herself. She was someone who had never been written about before. There was a fresh cache of papers that I guessed had not been destroyed, that were available nowhere else. ... Then, too, I had loved her poetry. I got my doctorate in the ‘70s, in that period where modernism was so strong and influential. I mean, I had loved [T.S.] Eliot and [Ezra] Pound. I was raised in a period where most of the poetry we read was inaccessible except by footnotes. This was very different from the poetry Millay did.”

By that, Milford means that Millay was considered obsolete partly because she actually wrote in rhyme and in sentences understandable by plain folks who didn’t have advanced degrees in literature. She was a people’s poet, and for the brief time that her candle burned so brightly across America, she turned the masses into lovers of her poetry.

Of course Millay was also outrageously unconventional for her time: She was sex-obsessed, forever attracting and then abandoning legions of brilliant lovers--of both sexes. Then she’d write verses that reeked of her delight at such autonomy.

Millay reveled in the undressed body: hers and everyone else’s. Nude erotic photos of her are in the Library of Congress archives. She demanded that all guests swim naked or be expelled from her home. She enjoyed drink and drugs to such a degree that she eventually became addicted. And despite all this, she was loyal, in her fashion, to both her husband and her muse. She had no children because they would have distracted her from her most compelling interest: herself.

My candle burns at both ends

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--

It gives a lovely light!

That jingle became a national anthem, of sorts, in the 1920s, among millions who craved life on a more lusty scale than was acceptable. Millay didn’t give a hoot about that.

Many critics appear to have enjoyed reading Milford’s book enormously, but some quibble with what they call her lack of scholarly approach. She did not explore fully enough the literary influences on the poet’s life, the genesis of her specific poems, et cetera.

One might construe this as a compliment. Do they mean her book is not dull and dry? Did she intentionally leave out all that jazz, relegating it to footnotes, which she says offer ample proof of significant literary scholarship?

“You bet I left it out. Intentionally. I did. Whether somebody ... thinks that’s good or not, who cares?” She says her book offers enough new material for future scholars to build on. “And that’s what I think and hope will happen.” She feels another poem welling up inside: “Read history/So learn your place in time . . . “

Milford stops. She’s forgotten a few lines, she says, but then picks up again.

“What a shining animal is man/who in the face of adversity plays tennis, writes plays, can even plan.”